India, Pakistan To Become SCO Full Members In June

It is planned to complete the acceptance process of India and Pakistan as full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at SCO Astana summit in June 2017, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said, Kazakhstan Today news agency reported.

He made such remarks at the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO member states in Astana April 21.

He stressed that the conclusion of joining of India and Pakistan as SCO full member will open up an absolutely new stage of SCO development, pave the way for new horizons of comprehensive cooperation within the organization and will strengthen its influence at the international level.

Abdrakhmanov also expressed hope that the bids of Iran for obtaining SCO full membership and bids of other partners for obtaining the status of the observer country will be approved soon.

The SCO was established in 2001. The SCO members now are China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Belarus are the SCO observer-countries, while Azerbaijan, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Armenia, Cambodia and Nepal are dialogue partners.

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Charles van der Leeuw, writer, news analyst, was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1952. He started working as an independent reporter on cultural issues in a wide variety of publications back in 1977. Ten years later, he settled down in war-torn Beirut as an international war correspondent, following a first experience in Iraq in 1985, which resulted in his first book on the Iraq-Iran war. After his kidnapping and release in 1989, his second book “Lebanon – the injured innocence” came out, followed, in early 1992, by “Kuwait burns”. Later in the year, he settled down in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a war correspondent. “Storm over the Caucasus” on the southern Caucasus geopolitical conflicts came out in 1997 in the Dutch language and two years later in the first English edition. It was followed by “Azerbaijan – a quest for identity” and “Oil and gas in the Caucasus and Caspian – a history”, both published in 2000, and “Black & Blue” published in Almaty in summer 2003 about the stormy rise of Russia’s present-day oil and gas companies.
In 2012, he published a bipartite book about the histories of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. His latest publication before this work was “Cold War II: cries in the desert – or how to counterbalance NATO’s propaganda from Ukraine to Central Asia”, published by Herfordshire Press, England, along with books similar to this one on Kyrgyzstan, published in English, French and German editions.